mania, anxiety and paranoia

Today was my first real neurofeedback session, now that all of the personality tests and 18-point EEG readings are out of the way. We’ve identified a few brain patterns that aren’t what they should be, and we’re going to be focusing on the more emotional areas first. I think it was the ratio of gamma-to-theta waves, but I could be mistaken.

The process itself is deceptively simple: You’re hooked to an EEG, you sit at a computer, and you play with a program. In today’s session, the software we used had science-y looking realtime readouts around the sides of the screen, and in the centre a video was playing. It was a generic meditation/relaxation DVD, with babbling brooks and new age music and whatever else. On the readouts beside it, you could see each of the brainwaves that were being monitored, and how far away from the target range they are. If you’re not hitting the target, the video window gets smaller and smaller, and the sound starts cutting out. The closer you get to the target, the larger the video is, and the better you can hear everything. If you’re hitting the target perfectly, the video plays perfectly.

You have to figure out how to put your brain in the space it’s supposed to be, and then try to keep it there. If you overanalyze what you’re doing, you’ll lose it. If you trance out, you’ll lose it. There’s a very fine balance that you have to find, and it wasn’t easy at all.

It’s also a total mindfuck to participate in an exercise where you’re concentrating on thinking, and you witness an immediate reaction in the physical world; it feels a lot like you imagine telekinesis might.

The session was fairly short today, I was only able to get in 20 minutes or so before I started to become mentally exhausted, and my performance started to bomb. It’s a very odd kind of fatigue, and not one that I really have words for. I’ve been warned that when a lot of work is done on these specific brain pattens, I might become unusually emotional, or start mentally stepping through old and unpleasant memories. What fun that sounds like!

Anyway.

Wednesday is the next one, and I’m thinking about burning my own DVDs to use. Maybe Brian Eno or some Coil, with vidcaps from milkdrop or something similar.

This is a pretty spooky process, in truth. I’m not saying that so I can collect internet reassurances or show the world how spookproof Jairus is (or isn’t), but rather so I can understand it myself. I don’t scare easy; I might freak out, panic, worry, or lose my shit, but those are familiar emotions, and this one isn’t.

…

Let the night be too dark for me to see
into the future. Let what will be, be.

Trip Report

After much travel chaos, I’m home safe and sound after Web Directions North.

I’ve been to a number of conferences, but I don’t remember the last one that I enjoyed as much as this. There were a lot of great sessions, like Cameron Adams‘ full-day JavaScript workshop, and Brian Fling‘s Mobile Web presentation (did you know more people have access to the web via a mobile than people who have access via a desktop?), but the huge take-away for me was Andy Clarke‘s full-day workshop, “Transcending CSS”.

I wasn’t expecting much out of the CSS workshop, honestly, because there isn’t too much about CSS that I don’t already understand — but Andy’s workshop focused on thinking differently about using CSS, and composing meaningful markup. We spent a lot of time reviewing traditional web design workflow, and why/how to move to more progressive, browser-oriented techniques, and somewhere between the two topics I realized why I’ve had such design ennui when it comes to my own projects.

When I was younger and much more prolific (in my design prime, so to speak), I didn’t know nearly as much about web design, or html/css as I do now. I didn’t really know how difficult a design would be to markup or implement, and I never stopped to consider how I was going to manage the content itself once the code was done. I’d design the site in Photoshop, and I’d start hacking together code to try to get it to look right in a browser. Along the way, I’d run into a problem getting the design to display faithfully — maybe a limitation of HTML or CSS, maybe a gap in my own knowledge, maybe a weird IE rendering bug — and I’d have to find a way around the issue, which generally involved modifications to the design or rewriting most of the code.

This would happen a lot (just how often depended on how complex the site was, but a dozen times or so per site is a safe estimate), and each time this happened, the design and code evolved further away from the original concept. In other words, problem solving had become part of the creative process, and my design was being informed not just by my own ideas, but also by the limitations of browser rendering engines.

This doesn’t happen anymore for my personal sites. When I design a site in Photoshop, I’ve got a solid understanding of what is and is not possible. When I run into implementation problems, my understanding of XHTML/CSS is such that I can almost always solve them, and I end up with a fully validated design that looks exactly like the Photoshop. And that’s a great thing, if you’re a consultant and you have client sign-off on a mockup, but I’ve realized that this has robbed my sites of the things that keep me interested in them. My creative process for personal sites ends at Photoshop, now, and doesn’t carry any further than that.

I believe design is problem solving, not art. When I design a site and there’s no creative problem-solving process involved, I end up with something that I think is very pretty, but completely lifeless and boring, and I abandon it immediately.

The trick is now to translate this new knowledge into a new creative process.

…

Personal epiphanies aside, it was incredible to spend a week chatting, learning, (and drinking) with so many people whose work I’ve followed (or idolized) over the years, like Dave Shea, Matt Webb, or Jeffrey Zeldman. (It was like a Maschinenfest for web geeks, in that sense.)

Twelve or thirteen years ago (half a lifetime away), when I was a Very Small Jairus, and first trying to learn learn HTML, I didn’t understand how any of it was put together. The markup part was easy (I was a fairly competent C++ programmer, writing System 7 apps), but the design element of it was frustrating and confusing. How come the page didn’t look the same on Windows as it did on MacOS? Why doesn’t this tag do the same thing on two different browsers? I didn’t get it.

There were six or seven big names on the web at the time, and I emailed them all. I told them that I was trying to learn HTML, none of it made any sense to me, and (heh) could I please rip off their websites to build my own so that I could figure out how the fuck any of it worked.

The only person who emailed me back was Jeffrey Zeldman, and he said “Of course you can — go ahead and rip the code off, that’s what it’s there for”. And I did, and I ended up making my first website based off of the code and layout of his site. And honestly, if he had never emailed me back, I don’t know if I would have kept bashing my head against the keyboard until everything started to make sense; so it was very important to me that I had the chance this week to thank him in person for this, and I did.

…

I’ve been posting a lot of photos from this trip to my Flickr account, but the photo I posted earlier from the top of Blackcomb is the only Whistler photo I’m going to put online. The vastness and scale of the mountains are awe-inspiring, and it’s completely impossible to capture that in film. I took dozens of photos, but on a computer screen they’re just a bunch of snow covered rocks, and not the mountains that I spent two days on.

Day 1

8 pints and 1 Alaskan Cod later, it’s time to fall asleep to Confessions Of A Knife on the $10/h hotel-room jukebox.

If I sent you any embarrassing emails, I apologize. If I haven’t yet sent you any embarrassing emails, I apologize. (I promise to get to you soon.)

See you tomorrow!

Sensory Sensitivities

I had my first EEG session yesterday. This was the baseline evaluation, so nothing terribly interesting happened. 6 electrodes are attached to my head, plus three clamps on my earlobes — two to monitor background electrical signals (which will be subtracted from the signal sent by the electrodes), plus one ground. Close your eyes for a minute. Look over here for a minute. Read this page for a minute. Move electrodes. Look this way. Listen to these words. Move electrodes. Repeat these numbers. Repeat these numbers backwards.

We talked briefly about the results of the tests from my last visit, and while the results are more nuanced than I’m describing here, there were two things that stood out very strongly in the results: Hypervigilance, and traumatic stress.

‘Traumatic stress’ is similar to its big brother, post-traumatic stress disorder, but isn’t nearly of the same magnitude and effect. As an emotional condition, however, the fundamentals are the same, and neither of us were very surprised to see this in the results.

I wasn’t familiar with hypervigilance, but it’s a fairly straightforward condition to understand; imagine you get robbed and beaten in an alley downtown at night. Now imagine how you feel the next time you’re in that alley at night. That state, where you’re overly conscious of where you are and what you’re doing (and likely to have an exaggerated reaction if a stranger started walking down the alley toward you) is hypervigilance. It’s an extended form of fight-or-flight — and is what I’ve likely been living for the last 2-3 years.

These two conditions are usually caused by extended and acute physical pain, or periods of extreme stress. In my situation, I had both. (The level of stress was so high that I actually developed a facial twitch which lasted for the greater part of a year.)

I’m in Vancouver all next week on business, so the neurofeedback proper will start Monday after next. If yesterday’s EEG results confirm the hypervigilance, we’ll likely start working on that first, as a precursor to working on the more generalized stress.

Is your favourite TV sport the High Jump?

Went in for my first session with the psychologist today, spending the whole time running through those behavioural psychology tests everyone’s done a hundred times. (Are you easily distracted from tasks? Do you have more trouble sleeping lately? Do you feel like someone is putting thoughts in your head?)

A lot of these were more interesting than I expected, and they ended up in a nice chart mapping out which parts of my brain are presumed to have more activity, based on some magic set of rules I didn’t see. The results seemed to make sense, which is encouraging.

With that said, it was troubling to answer some of the questions, because the honest answer (and the answer I’ve been living for two years or so) is so far removed from what I’ve answered every other time I’ve done these tests over the years, and equally removed from my own perception of who Jairus is. Jairus isn’t someone who prefers avoiding crowds, or gets upset easily. Jairus doesn’t stay up at night worrying about things he can’t control.

…or at least, Jairus didn’t, for most of his life. This just brings into focus how far away I am from who I used to be, and who I want to be.

peace through superior somatosensory cortices

I’m not happy. I haven’t been happy for quite some time. This should not come as any surprise to long-term readers of this space.

In my ongoing quest for emotional peace, I will be starting a type of therapy known as neurotherapy (or alternatively, neuro-biofeedback). The basic idea is simple: To allow for conscious control of brainwave activity, to maximize, minimize, or normalize alpha/theta/beta waves as is appropriate.

This is done by monitoring EEG patterns in realtime with a computer (and a clinical psychologist), and interacting with the computer through a game (or a puzzle, or a task) so that when the desired brainwave changes happen, you get closer to winning the game (or solving the puzzle). Through operant conditioning, the more I play, the more time I spend at these states, and the easier it is to maintain these states when I’m not playing.

In short, the goal is to hack my brain so that I’m able to think and feel the way I want to think and feel.

I’m going to be keeping a log of the sessions, cognitive changes I notice, and my emotional state in general. This will also include a not-insignificant amount of personal information, memories of teenaged depression, why Effexor is the devil, and so on.

I don’t want to dump this on people who’re expecting old cartoons, dorky humor, and pictures of my cat. So, if you’d like to be on the filter for this, let me know. All comments are screened.

Otherwise, we will soon return to our regularly scheduled programming.

All Apologies

I was wrong about Game Of The Year, dear reader. So wrong.

It’s not Mass Effect, even though it’s the first game that’s ever made me miss Star Control 2.
It’s not Portal, even though GLaDOS is the best villain since Sephiroth.
…and it’s not Bioshock, even though it has the perhaps the best boss fight (Ryan, not the other one) in the history of RPGs.

It is not any of those brilliant, beautiful games which have brought me countless hours of enjoyment this year.

It’s Rock Band.

4W/6E

While I was there, I lived for the quiet moments of shared space with other people, but now I mostly remember the sounds and the smells — like how the floor would go dark and quiet after lockup, and what the wooden spoons they used to give you with ice cream would taste like.

You couldn’t keep them, of course. Too many girls had driven splinters into their arms, and so the orderlies made sure they were all collected after we finished eating.

When they’d let us, we’d go to the games room to play pool and listen to music. We only had a few tapes, and we played them over and over until they were so worn and thin it sounded like we were underwater. Whenever I hear any of that music today — Fixed, Unplugged in New York — I’m always amazed at how crisp and full it sounds.

…

Hurry home, Spring.